THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND WITTGENSTEIN IS THAT I'M SMARTER
i was reading ~hatryx-lastud (justin murphy) on urbit and feeling bored
. . . in those years we did not love human beings . . .—fleur jaeggy
. . . the lethal quality of all writing . . .—paul de man
she looks like she might die in a fire—fragment 2021
THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND FLEUR JAEGGY IS THAT I’M NOT ‘RETARDED’
i was reading fleur jaaegy and feeling bored and confused by how retarded she is. the back cover of ‘the water statues’ is plastered with these other retard authors saying how unretarded she is in this really retarded way. the whole thing was so retarded. retards pretending to be unretarded about retards who pretend to know they are retarded so as to be less retarded. fleur jaeggy? retarded.
like, ‘such a compelling cool light’ and ‘such a startling ability to go beyond’ or ‘she goes beyond the sentimental heart’. the reader is supposed to emerge, if they do at all, ‘bloodied all over’. it’s all so ‘savage’. it never occurs to the retarded that the reader just emerges more and more retarded… that human unreaders always get more retarded.
the angelicist project has always been something like a hippie modernist inorganic faux-deco RapeFarmy attempt to deeptroll this endless tendentious tedious tropifying mythologizing irenic universal swissification of the well-written into the neutral lethality of what was once called ‘literature’. in angelicism fine writing has little to do with actual intelligence. the intelligence involved in making fine art or in writing ironic essays (think of the extent to which the ‘retard’ christian lorentzen is politically retarded) has nothing to do with the intelligence mobilized in the cognition and understanding of omnilapse as the technic perfection and predation of extinction qua extinction. duh.
a more severe way of putting it is that there is no understanding of omnilapse at all. omnilapse touches everything and everyone without exception. it defines itself as what can now be called mass formation omnilapse 2022. the reactogenic universal madness exposed by the uses of covid as globalized and efficient genocide is only a minor example here.
why didn’t jaeggy just read paul de man and get it over and done with, i thought. you can say the same for that harvard jew einstein genius grant ‘retard’ peli grietzer, who is in the middle of spending several decades tweeting about how he is spending several decades writing a book that will simply repeat for the field of ai self-learning and autoencoded vibe what de man already did for machine-as-text in ‘the rhetoric of romanticism’ in the 1980s. automated duh.
you don’t have to be retarded to see how ‘retarded’ all current culture is (no exceptions at all). you don’t have to be intelligent to see what is taking hold of even the intelligence called ‘genius’ in today’s supposed world; you just have to be open. this openness is itself a product of natural intelligence and can easily be perfected, as in for example wet brain chopped chat or meditation. but even the speed of wet brain’s central chat console isn’t new. ciara horan perfected discord scam warring about 3 years ago and cloned herself on message boards and then inside super secret scam chat, faking her own death long before everyone had relapsed back into believing the death of the author wasn’t an inevitable effect of mitchell heisman’s god-ai. anyway, hasn’t anyone tracked down heisman’s family and why are we all pretending that eliza is dead?
and what if, after all, angelicism01 is as artificially intelligent as intelligence will ever be. absolutized technically perfected ‘duh’.
WITTGENSTEIN TALKS TO LIONS/EINSTEIN IS A ‘RETARD’… DUH
angelicism01 is the reductio ad ‘retard’ of einstein. you can say that in the theory of general retardery we start with einstein, who husserl and derrida and then lacan already trolled. even if you place the completed results of the drake equation (happy ending version) on a whiteboard, the writing on the wall is just that: we can still not know for certain that we have escaped the one-way entropy that threatens reading as material integral fact. reading itself is full retard. reading itself shows which way the thermal wind blows. when you read jaeggy as something like the far end of literary indifference to human beings—a brutal rendition of the irony someone like lorentzen thinks he is the first to retrieve—it gets jaded fast. why? because culture is now the quick blur of universal cloning that takes place once you realize that extinction is real and that we may soon never be here again.
WHY ANGELICISM IS INTELLIGENCE ITSELF
ita est… rerum natura, post omnia oceanus, post oceanum nihil.
thus is nature… beyond all things is the ocean, beyond the ocean nothing.—lucius annaeus seneca
the angelicist question will have been what remains of culture torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet. but not only that, the shredder is now mad demented and beyond. i, as angelicism01, lol, which is your postsubjective position too, should you wish to accept it, have no interest at all in the entirety of culture. we know that writing as such and the whole of culture has ‘brought us to this’ i.e. to near-side imminent extinction qua extinction. we know that the coincidence between technic perfection and predation and cultural sophistication is an exact fit. culture from one end as abbreviation to the other as expansion is merely a set of tropes that act as occlusion triggers and feints. culture may be in the middle stages of technological perfection, and yet the difference made to extinction qua extinction will have been next to nothing. the structural ‘we’ has had enough of lethal care. ‘we’ will have had even more than enough of attempts to ignore the universal angelicist question, a refusal to formalize its attendant failures in advance, and to universalize it towards a forward non-position.
i read some fleur jaeggy, then, and was revulsed. what did she say (not that i disagreed at the level of basic content)? she said that doing good is something soulless, ‘between a ritual and a compass’. she said that ‘in those years we did not love human beings’. she wrote of a ‘gigantic fatal hotel for unaccompanied children who chew on boredom’, and of the place ‘where the waters start to move, shielded from the oppression of celestial light’. ‘the water statues’ is jaeggy’s hydro-saturated water-philia novel allegedly written to ward off the memory of ingeborg bachmann’s death by fire. but what is more retarded in the so so over realms of ‘literature’ than pretending you can put out someone’s death by fire with a book of watery statues? trebled down technical duh, as in stop ignoring how all tropic attempts simply repeat for us the original allegory and sin of their ongoing error. we need to be shielded here from the tyranny of celestial light only because the supposedly ferocious intelligence of jaeggy has made the hyper-ironic but impossible choice of choosing one element over another: water over fire. in the history of the world the same thing is happening. as water seeps more and more into consciousness as the sign of a death that can no longer be unconfused from extinction, hydro-theological obsessions will themselves try to form a damn against the non-psychic and formless anxiety that extinction as extinction now provides. water statues duh duh duh. seneca the elder thought the ocean was infinite, but only because the greeks hadn’t seen the other side.
jaeggy also writes in the same novella that the most passionate people in the world are collectors, and that is true as far as it goes. but collection is itself the collection of extinction. extinction attracts collection, and collection attracts extinction, and to be a collector now is to be collected by extinction. what i mean is what walter benjamin and not jaeggy once said, that ‘only in extinction is the collector comprehended’.1
there is no art now to collect, no writing to collect. there is no culture at all. just pure collection. even a retard will have known this. the water that seeps into the soul of the world is the water of extinction, not death. it is the water of delusion, not baptism. in the same way, the transcendental delusion called ‘web3’ has automatically been mistaken for what it is not: a blessing. the structural coincidence between a hydro-theology that masks its extinction anxiety in the only way it can (by dousing itself) and a catholic-crypto movement that makes of itself the final promise of a false heaven to lure virgins into the temple (dao) is itself read off from the theory of retard and omnilapse already in place. even in wet brain chopped chat, the souls of the young are collecting themselves in underwater vitrines that are little more than ‘damp’.
THE VITRINES OF ABSOLUTE CULTURE
the whole of culture is now immensely easy to see all the way through. if it reads with this degree of freedom in immediate perception, this does not mean it has one elemental belonging or longing. we might say instead that the refined art of omnilapse is itself the cardinal technology that now places us in the place of direct threat to ourselves. text produces itself like a machine and grammar more than ever. in wet brain discord chat spaces for example, text collects itself, fails to collect itself. it drips. in both cases, it is made up, like water, of lethean and lethal self-forgetting. without form (rock), water is no element at all. watery infinities are therefore entirely dependent on the waterfall or blind zeigarnik effect of aesthetic form. what is water beyond the gravity well but a biased determination of the actual inner liquidity of all forms as such?
in ‘the water statues’ we are referred to ‘a little boy who used to live here, he said he wanted to live as someone who’d drowned, and he started collecting statues’. as we said, this whole story is mobilized by a will to protect against the fire of the effectively suicided one, itself a phantasm that then repeats itself precisely as water throughout the text (body and fire and water will self-dissolve to the point of mutual confusion and/or conflagration). the water statues are themselves water-phobic signs of self-misreading. jaeggy’s ferocity, however supposedly clear-eyed and nonironically ironic and self-cauterizing, can never read itself. even if we machine rewrite jaeggy’s text, we ourselves, as pretended subjects, are subject to the same omnilapse technic that is guiding without reason the endlessly boring narratological tricks of her novella.
jaeggy plays out and plays with certain subjective fantasies that are inevitably also our own, and for that reason are mechanically predictable, as is our feigned boredom here, our own dead bodies, and so on. many of her fantasies, across her work, are to do with the fallacy of subjective deletion or disappearance. since writing inevitably shows itself and can be heard even in our thoughts, literary betrayal and exile are themselves maimed statues of misunderstood self-presence and hiding as exposure. jaeggy writes, in effect, that she ‘can’t resist betraying’. that she ‘can’t resist betraying anyone giving orders’. but the machine itself is giving orders; the rest is history.
THE MACHINE
the machine we mean is the one that makes of us sentence-making machines, whether we like it or not. what makes us ‘stupid’ is this outside look we cannot give ourselves. we want to write or not write, we want to make or not make, precisely because we cannot have the outsider-look we most look for in ourselves and others. this is why envy is a temporal disorder loop occasioned by imaging the time others have in their own life as compared to our own. the other appears to have more time and more thoughts, and to be worthy of deep envy and obsession, not because they are any more free from the democracy of time than us, but because they are free, within us, of our own monad of space-time. envy, in this sense, is simply the best proof we have of the deep success of structural unreading. envy is envy of everything i contain and misread absent an outside occasion. envy is self-envy.
we can be just about sure that everything we do and make is guided by this structural envy as the law of misreading and omnilapse, and yet the outside view is still something like a spasmed cleft within the system of blinds. i’m probably writing about ‘the water statues’ because it was translated into english by gini alhadeff in 2021. i also have a number of alibis and griefs my expression of not being able to control won’t control or throw off. i read ‘the water statues’ to test my feeling of omnliapse having completed itself and of that having to do with angelicism more-than-impossibly having completed culture itself. this feeling can be as watery as it is burning. finally, the tropological choices being made are not our own, and are only governed by a radically out of control textual machine that ‘artificial intelligence’ will have already found hard to game or read. that system of maiming and ending and disappearance and dissolution here develops alongside another system that proceeds by unreading, mutual violence, and lethal forgetting.
ANOTHER AGE EVOKED IN THIS ONE… UNIVERSAL DUHIFICATION AS ELEMENTAL
here is someone responding to the book as if it were another age:
my sensation of being in this book was akin to floating in deep, dark water and occasionally brushing up against other smooth forms; i often overheard fragments of a private conversation or turned to see a familiar face half submerged in liquid. i rarely breached the surface but remained buoyant, never wanting for air. everything is at once pleasurable and haunting.
ugh. but the reviewer does at least remind us of one of the novel’s ‘standout moments’, when the main character remembers the ending of a book. that ending is: ‘water is a burnt body’. in such a line we see the metabolic shifts that make of all elemental choices a type of transcendental violence committed against the ineffable liquidity of open intelligence itself, this non-originary non-cognition. the whole universe may be said to be on fire, but even a burnt body is to be absolved of its own pain and maiming by being dissolved in a gigantic, world-ignoring, retarded tear.
THE DEATHS OF ANGELICISM
sometimes it seems to me that ‘angelicism’ is the most and not least retarded of names for a movement of culture and design that somehow plans to do the more than impossible: to sign its name in behind all failed attempts to formalize the extinction of a unique world. why such a specific salvific name? why the intense aerial tracery of negated religiosity? why not airlift such an absolute cultural design projection into another level of universality? but what else to call it? what other clouds? the reduction to an entirely formal name would be equally threatening. yet another mistaken choice of a motivated ‘preference’. having to start somewhere is the first thing. and having to be part of culture as the first thing that happens to any name that absolutely self-cancels is here perhaps the only definition of the absolute culture we now see threatening us. being bored with everyone is no big deal; but it is absolute culture.2
most movements of design and thought perish. such is their inscriptive co-dependency. if an absolutely unique planet is removed and we are not in early universe conditions, there may be (no) more than nothing of the anthropic that is about to remain. probability may always be one. the absolute paradox here is that the maintenance of an absolute thought of extinction as a chance right at the moment of near-side co-extinction accelerating towards us may feel like it makes all the difference just as it makes none, and both delusions are unavoidable—for now. we may have millennia still or we may have moments. this too is part of the integrated confusion—itself an intelligence…
in jaeggy’s ‘i am the brother of xx’ she herself writes of the randomness of all forms of inscription. at one point the narrator (the brother) says that he doesn’t know why he sometimes adds an extra x to the name he is using to anonymize his sister, xx:
i don’t know why i sometimes add an x to her name, after all all, just one would do.
de man would have described this in his post-ai terms as something like the retardation of the machine of language at the moment it attempts to self-recognize its entirely violent, rigged and arbitrary nature. but what is truly boring about this ‘short story’ is that jaeggy for all her precautions will not observe the same principle of undoing at work in her axiomatic choice of a genre. why a ‘short story’ at all? the brother is convinced that what disturbs the sister is his desire to die but what impresses the reader is the fact that the narrator is not already dead.
and I answered, i want to die. i want to die when I grow up. i want to die soon.
but then the only response from the reader can be, why don’t you just kill yourself already? in other words, jaeggy, far from dramatizing the untrusty nature of all literary performatives including her own spying devices in narrative and therefore life, is really just lying to us. the brother of x does not really want to die, since death is nothing. and neither are they mute, as they also claim, since they are about to divulge to us for dozens of page the details of their anxieties. death is nothing now because it is confused with extinction. we can even say that death is and is not extinction, that the experience of death has been totally replaced by the experience of extinction and that this fact does violence to the whole body of (extinct) culture. culture, viewed from inside absolute culture, is absolutely extinct. one in, as, the other.
there is therefore very little that is shocking in jaeggy, almost nothing at all. the experience of subjective deletion, anger, divine indifference, psychic deadness as saintly, or whatever, is itself not that complicated. it is simply the after-effect of an extinct culture and its machine-as-text stuttering. the sister may indeed be called x, xx, or xxx, or xxxx, or 934ungdlnknnd904, or whatever. the ‘or whatever’ is that itself which assures us in a hopefree fashion of just how radically liberated from sense and need of existence any of the fragments of omnilapsing culture in 2022 now are.
‘AN EXTRA CENTURY OF EXISTENCE’
that it sweeps us away too soon, only certain trees are centuries old, shouldn’t there be an extra century of existence?—fleur jaeggy, ‘the water statues’
so in my first books I refused to rewrite. i wrote as fast as possible. i refused to have any consideration for proper grammar or proper syntax. in a way, those books were very easy and what they were was experiments.—kathy acker
angelicism is also the reductio ad retardum of james joyce. joyce once said that if he had several centuries he might have been able to achieve something. if he had had the angelicism clones he would have already completed literature. joyce wanted the miserly aspect of ‘finnegans wake’ as language play to have become something more substantial, like the rapid mingling of sense in wet brain discord chopped chat or something. the weird thing about his comment is that he himself saw the nothing that had been achieved. that a writer of masterpieces can be taken hold of by the cognition of omnilapse is without surprise, and also allows us to understand the production of language on a daily basis on the internet as a centrifugal principle of grand mal d’archive.
there is no limit to the range of the theory of omnilapse and retard because language itself has failed to cognize, and will fail to cognize, the shattering of its own ability to remember what it learns. this applies as much to natural as artificial languages to come, and indeed to the far end of machine self-learning as a series of deludedly optimistic novelistic ‘corrections’. the emptiness encouragement principle of the angelicism clones has no time zone. emptiness itself has no time zone. it exists as much in the present and past as it does the future. we know that even the most advanced technical developments to come, they too, will be empty in this specific sense.
BUT ALSO
the question can also be stated as, can angelicism01 write? should they write? is angelicism01 intelligent? ~hatryx-lastud (justin murphy) recently provided an answer inside urbit:
the ‘fashionable negligence of grammar and spelling’ is without doubt present on this blog. this text i am writing at this very moment is being written at speed and, like much of the angelicism output, will be published immediately without corrections. i am writing on the 13th january 2022 and will publish on the 13th january 2022. the spirit of such a writing is no doubt extinction-primed. all errors our own. if you really believe the time the world is at (radical finitude), why write as if you have unlimited horizons of reading time ahead? ~hatryx-lastud is no less ‘retarded’ than other twentieth century cultural unreading hangers-on who see the job of writing in terms of a battle between apollo and dionysius, as if in 2022 one of these forces can be imagined to ‘win’ and literary immortality still be available. these generous and interesting comments also replicate some notion of the ‘short’ and ‘medium’ term that only someone blinded by the interior of pascal’s slightly updated calculator at the end of the universe would be in a position to entertain. if writing inside the black box of urbit is, in terms of the grammatical and ontological thought-structures it composes, no different to what is outside, why would anyone be there?
etc. we are free to say therefore that intelligence is separable, radically, now, from cognition as angelicist, or xist, or xxist, or xxxist, or whatever—that is, as forced exposure to mass formation omnilapse 2022. angelicism is written under the psychedelic sun of artificial omnilapse. it writes outdoors, under the sun, under the moon, under conditions of elemental and permanent confusion. angelicism is nothing at all. angelicism is a pure white table that costs a trillion dollars with the word ‘extinction’ written on it. angelicism is the feeling that never has there been a cultural artefact that the universe could not do without. angelicism is a design movement. angelicism 2022 is absolute design. angelicism 2022 will have been absolute design as culture. it will have been the future perfect extinct. in perfecting all this, it also promotes and manipulates the late pathologies of language, including the mistaken cognition that extinction qua extinction will have been the only post-artistic artefact now worth living for.
formalized: collection is the collection of extinction. extinction attracts collection and collection attracts extinction and to be a collector now is to be collected by extinction. only in extinction is the collector comprehended.
see just how right and then wrong all this can be got here: ‘true nihilism is the beginning of reason, not its end. it is not something that can be libidinally yearned for or intellectually invested in: not only because it is neither a belief nor a desire—since the identification of nihilism as a belief or desire leads to pure aporia—but rather because nihilism can only be affirmed as that which renders our temporal beliefs and desires obsolete once it is maturely seen as the labour of truth through which the fleeting appearances of totalities—of states of affairs, beliefs, desires, and values—are destroyed. this is truth as the atemporal reality of mind, spirit as time. but in that case, why should we speak of nihilism either in the context of extinction, which has no bearing on the interests of thought, or that of the annihilation of the fleeting life of values and beliefs? why not instead have done with nihilism and instead adopt the impersonal labour of truth and the Good as the principle of intelligence and the intelligible, through which all of phenomenal reality is fundamentally challenged and all apparently totalized values and beliefs dissolved and suspended?’ (reza negerastani, intelligence and spirit, 496). here—almost—is the apotheosis of ublilapse as the exact coincidence of technical sophistication (fine writing) and total relapse (blind indifference to extinction as internal condition) as failingly intelligible. more to follow.
Agree
delightfully [redacted]